The sports hall doubles as a prayer room and dining hall for male teenagers, at other times for young women, but never the two together. In the kindergarten, female teachers, warned of an impending visit by a man, draw full facial veils before receiving their guest. When the guest arrives, the children offer a chorus in Arabic: “As salaam aleikum” — peace be upon you.

“Here we can keep ourselves on the path of religion,” said Nasir Nathalia, a 15-year-old student at the Leicester Islamic Academy. His friend Mohammed Seedat agrees. “There is less chance here of going off the track,” he said.

This is the piety that Britain’s expanding Islamic schools seek to project, casting themselves as typical of the thousands of faith schools, mainly Christian, that make up roughly one-third of all publicly financed British schools.

But the visible differences — the way female teenagers wear the full-length dress and head-covering and the boys wear black robes and skullcaps — play into a ferocious debate about the sense of separateness or readiness to integrate Britain’s estimated 1.8 million Muslims, about 3 percent of the population…

…“Muslim children in this country tend to live separate lives anyhow,” said Mark Halstead, a professor of education at the University of Huddersfield in northern England. “Whether they go to Muslim school does not make much difference to their segregation. They are concentrated in the inner cities. They could be attending a state school that is 90 percent Muslim anyway.”

A report by Simon Burgess, a professor of economics, discovered that, for instance, in the blue-collar Tower Hamlets district of East London, where ethnic minorities form 48 percent of the population, nearly half the schools were “exclusively nonwhite.”

The issue of Islamic separateness is magnified by a recent debate about a full-face veil that shows only the eyes and is known as the niqab. Some non-Muslims, most notably Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, have said the veil illustrates that Muslims are rejecting British norms; others say simply that Britons are discriminating against Muslims.

The debate cuts to the heart of Britain’s stated philosophy on multiculturalism, defined 40 years ago by the Labor politician Roy Jenkins when he was home secretary. In laying out a new immigration policy, he said immigration should not lead to a “flattening process of assimilation” but instead should provide “equal opportunity accompanied by cultural diversity.”

But now, as the country is struggling so publicly with Muslim assimilation, some analysts like Mr. Phillips of the Commission for Racial Equality fear that a premium on cultural separateness has Britain “sleepwalking into segregation.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch Parliamentarian and secular Muslim reformer, has courageously identified the taboo discussion which must take place to understand, and defuse, the scourge of modern jihad terrorism:
“In their thinking about radical Muslim terrorism most politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and other commentators have avoided the core issue of the debate, which is Muhammad’s example.”

…Disregarding murderous threats, and the prospect of social ostracism, the intrepid author Robert Spencer — a serious independent scholar of Islam for the past two decades — has taken up Hirsi Ali’s challenge in his compelling new book, “The Truth About Muhammad.”

Mr. Spencer’s stated purpose in writing the book was to elucidate, in particular, those aspects of Muhammad’s life used by Muslims today to rationalize violence, or other behaviors incompatible with Western constructs of human rights and dignity. And Mr. Spencer, whom I have come to know through my own independent research on Islamic doctrine and history, fulfills admirably his pledge not to “deride,” “lampoon” or “mock” Muhammad, but instead compose “a scrupulously accurate account of what he [Muhammad] said and did” regarding these critical matters.

A salient feature of “The Truth About Muhammad” is its exclusive reliance on pious Muslim sources: the earliest (and most respected) Muslim biographers of Muhammad, Ibn Ishaq (died 773), Ibn Sa’d (845), and the great historian al-Tabari (923); the “gold-standard” canonical hadith collections of Bukhari (870), and Muslim (875); and the Koran itself.

As Mr. Spencer notes, these are the same sources contemporary Muslim biographers have relied upon, both respected scholars (such as the late Martin Lings, aka Abu Bakr Siray Ad-Din), and popularizers (Javeed Akhter, Yahiya Emerick).

…He concludes with a series of logical, unflinching recommendations for non-Muslim governments, all of which hinge, ultimately, upon an honest recognition of Muhammad’s bellicose example: Stop insisting that Islam is a religion of peace; initiate a full-scale Manhattan Project to find new energy sources; make Western aid contingent upon renunciation of the jihad ideology; call upon American Muslim advocacy groups to work against the jihad ideology; revise immigration policies with the jihad ideology in view.